Fifteen-thousand servicemembers will begin a large-scale military training exercise on Monday in and around Alaska. Northern Edge 2021 will involve all four branches of the armed services, along with some 250 warplanes and multiple naval vessels. The exercise will be staged out of military and civilian airfields around the state, as well as an aircraft carrier and other ships offshore.
This year’s Northern Edge won’t quite be the biggest of the biennial exercises that’ve been held in recent years. But it will be the most widely dispersed, with operations on the ground and in the skies over the state’s enormous training ranges, military installations and civilian and dual-use airfields in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Juneau, King Salmon and Cold Bay, to name a few.
“The exercise is going to have a lot more distributed operations than we’ve had in the past,” says Lt. Col. Michael Boyer, a lead planner for Northern Edge.
Boyer said the exercise will bring together personnel from different branches of the military, along with their equipment, to train and test their ability to jointly respond to threats in any of the domains in which they operate – on land, in the air, at sea, as well as cyberspace and outer space.
“Northern Edge represents an opportunity for the joint force to put all the pieces of the puzzle together in one large venue,” he said. “It is high-end, realistic warfighting training.”
Boyer says servicemembers typically participate in exercises involving their own branch of the service. And he says Northern Edge enables them to experience joint operations with other branches that mirror the complexity of 21st century warfare, “so we can work on the gaps and seams between services, identify them and also give opportunities for our younger generation to see the big picture and help grow our future leaders.”
Boyer declined to talk about the scenario that will play out during Northern Edge 2021, so as not to give participants any sort of heads-up about what they’ll be encountering. He offered a generic response to a question about whether the exercise will include, for example, intercepting aircraft that enter Alaska’s Air Defense Identification Zone. That happens every few months when Russian aircraft fly into the ADIZ, which is international airspace.
“We’ll always keep an eye on it,” he said in an interview last week. “We always remain postured for events. But beyond that I really can’t make any more specific comments.”
Hawaii-based Pacific Air Forces organized this year’s exercise, which Boyer says will be the biggest to be held this year in the Indo-Pacific region in which PACAF operates.
This will also be the first Northern Edge to include an aircraft carrier strike group and a Marine Expeditionary Unit, both of which will operate mainly out of vessels in the Gulf of Alaska.
Boyer says the state’s two Air Force bases will host most of the other services’ aviation assets.
“Most of the aircraft will operate out of Eielson,” he said, “and you will see some aircraft in operations in and around Fort Greely, along with the ranges associated with that facility.”
Operations also will be conducted out of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, he added.
Boyer says aircraft participating in the exercise will include the F-35B, the Marine Corps’ version of the Air Force F-35A that’s being based at Eielson. But, the Marines’ F-35 is a “jump jet,” which can take off and land vertically, without a runway.
Boyer says people who live in communities near participating militarry installations will likely see and hear a lot of aircraft activity during the exercises, which will end May 14th. He says the Air Force will comply with all airspace restrictions and will do all it can to limit noise, like sonic booms.
